Wars and Rumors of Wars - The Signs of the Times
A sermon by the Rev. Bruce Southworth
The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist
Sept. 22, 2002

Readings:

… The challenge before the American people is the most serious since the rise of Fascism and the long encounter with the Soviet Union. It is a time to reaffirm American faith in the values of law, justice and peace, as well as confidence in the Constitution. Bush has been acting from the outset as if the decision to go to war is his alone, although there is no claim of immediacy that justifies circumventing Congress. The White House seems to believe that consulting Congress is mainly a matter of courtesy and not required by the Constitution, which vests in Congress the power to declare war and appropriate the funds for its conduct.

Similarly, the apparent bipartisan consensus within the Beltway that US foreign policy involving the use of international force is free from the prohibitions of international law is a frightening repudiation of the efforts throughout the past century to make aggressive wars "a crime against the peace," and its perpetrators punishable as war criminals. Such was the US stand at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II with respect to German and Japanese leaders, with a promise by the victors that they would in the future be held to the same standards of accountability. Instead of passively watching on the sidelines as the government goes down the path to war, citizens urgently need to resist….

Richard Falk - "A Dangerous Game" in "The Nation," 10/9/02

"A Scholarly Analysis Of
Developments (Including
Satellite Photos,
Intelligence Reports And
Middle-Eastern Strategy
Considerations) That
Persuaded The Bush
Administration That Its
Policy on Dealing With
Iraq Had To Change From
Economic Sanctions To
Pre-Emptive War"

Osama's split and Wall Street's sagging.
It's time to get that puppy wagging.
Calvin Trillin - "The Nation," 10/7/02

Sermon: Wars and Rumors of Wars - The Signs of the Times

"Wars and rumors of war"… that phrase appears in Christian scripture in the book of Matthew and arose in the context of the persecution of early Christians with an admonition to keep the faith in the midst of hardship, persecution, and even torture.

A little earlier in the same book, when the Pharisees and Sadducees are challenging Jesus, there are these words: "When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' And in the morning, 'It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.' You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times."

So, here we are too, part of the human struggle for meaning and wisdom, trying to keep the faith in the middle of wars and rumors of wars and trying to interpret the signs of our times.

This morning I will take my turn, with a few words about these dangerous, fragile times, when for the most part fears, expediency, and arrogance seem momentarily to be trumping wisdom, moral judgment, and justice-making.

The signs of the times:

The Dow Jones industrial average, the benchmark of our economic health, on Thursday hit its lowest point since July; we also completed four consecutive weeks of losses. What do we have? A recession, perhaps with budding economic recovery - perhaps a double dip recession, a "W" shaped economic period, "W" aptly appropriate given our President, George W. Bush. A recovery that is slow-paced - ephemeral for some, for many. A friend of mine got a new job after more than a year of being laid off; another just lost his job, though "lost" is such a strange way of putting it, isn't it? And certainly a goodly number here in our congregation face economic uncertainty, as you search for work, even though others have been able to make positive job moves.

With more losers than winners, the signs of the times, economically, are shaky.

Unemployment benefits are running out for tens of thousands in New York State, and as Senator Clinton pointed out in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times earlier this week, over half a million New Yorkers are jobless, and 135,000 have exhausted their unemployment benefits.

Then she adds this brief paragraph, big numbers hard to comprehend intellectually or emotionally: "At this time last year, 800,000 Americans had been out of work for six months or longer. That number nearly doubled to 1.5 million (in the last year), and it is expected to increase to more than 2 million by December." (9/20/02) She goes on to observe that in the early 1990s unemployment benefits were extended five times during that recession. Yet amidst these troubling times, Congress so far has only extended benefits once, and as she says, "once is not enough."

Not only is it compassionate, but it is also economically smart to do this because, as the Department of Labor has reported, when benefits are extended, every dollar in benefits generates more than $2 in gross domestic product. (And economists I read, not just a politician, say that this is a very good thing.)

While Congress hesitates and perhaps refuses to act, growing unemployment is one of those signs of the times.

The signs of the times: a month ago corporate greed and malfeasance by top executives and stock analysts, from Enron to Martha Stewart lit up the newspapers in the dog days of August doldrums. Those in the news have also included WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia Communications, Xerox, Tyco International, Lucent Technologies, ImClone, and others.

From one of those website postings that try to read the signs of the times came this analysis:

1. In traditional capitalism, you have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on your income.
2. In Enron capitalism, you have two cows. You sell all three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap so that you get all four cows back with a tax exemption for five cows.
   The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. Its annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet is provided. The public buys your bull. (Washington Spectator, 8/1/02)

Amidst the corporate malfeasance, rumors of war shift the shape of news coverage. "It's the economy, stupid," was the political mantra of the 1990s, about elections…. So, given the weak economy, political focus, for example on war, that can replace the economy as an issue, is welcome in some circles, to say the least.

Here and there, something positive can happen. There was the good, good news from a court order that the immigrant Mexican laborers in many of the Korean markets will now receive at least a minimum wage. These workers had been working as many as 72 hours a week for $2 or $3 an hour, and NY Attorney General Spitzer has brokered this agreement with market owners. All this is great, but I don't entirely understand why these market owners are being given amnesty for agreeing to obey the law. Last year, Spitzer forced some to pay back-wages for overtime and minimum wage violations, but apparently the rest will be off the hook for that. There are good consequences, it seems, even though it appears he is bribing owners to obey the law, rather than enforcing it as he did in the past.

What else? Not so good news is that the Living Wage bill in our City Council is languishing, and what seemed to be moving toward passage last spring has now stalled.

So, trying to read the signs of the times, now as always, the struggle continues for economic equity and justice in our skewed economy of the wealthy and the struggling.

Also, there is so much more that I'll have to return to another day - the boycott of Taco Bell to help laborers in Florida and the sweatshop abuses by Disney, the Gap and others that continue…. But these will have to wait for another day.

The signs of the times: an election is coming up with the mid-term elections in the House of Representatives, the economy is doing poorly, and corporate abuses remain.
Thus, war, at least rumor of war distracts the good people of our nation, and like good soldiers and patriotic citizens, many in our country are ready to unite around the President.

And there is more than the poor economy. The signs of the times speak to me of a war against our Constitution and our civil liberties. From the conservative think-tank, the Cato Institute, comes the observation that Attorney General Ashcroft and President Bush "have supported measures that are antithetical to freedom, such as secretive subpoenas, secretive arrests, secretive trials and secretive deportations. " It goes on to note that the USA Patriot Act "will allow the police to compel records from any business regarding any person, including medical records from hospitals, educational records form universities and even records of books that have been checked out from the local library or purchased from a bookstore." The conservative Cato Institute continues, "that ought to give pause to people of goodwill from all across the political spectrum - since those are tell-tale signs of societies that are unfree."

On a more populist note than this conservative think-tank, the Northampton, Massachusetts City Council voted unanimously last May "for a 'resolution to defend the Bill of Rights against Ashcroft's intrusions on 'freedom of speech, assembly and privacy; the right to counsel and due process in judicial proceeding, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.'"

A longtime friend of this congregation Roger Baldwin, with our minister John Haynes Holmes, was among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. Fortunately, those like Anthony Romero, the executive Director of the ACLU, continue the work for protecting our rights and have participated in cases such as the one in which a Federal judge, Gladys Kessler ruled that the names of "detainees suspected of immigration violations had to be made public. 'Secret arrests, [she] wrote… 'are a concept odious to a democratic society.'" (9-19-02, B. Herbert, p A35)
Secret arrests, another of the signs of the times.

As Mr. Romero puts it, "I just say that most Americans would think it's wrong to hold people without charging them with a crime, and without letting them see a lawyer, and to consider them guilty until they're proven innocent."

The signs of the times are strange indeed when the so-called right and the so-called left agree on the violation of civil liberties, yet what we get in the news is the rumor of war, to distract us all.

Along the way, it's hard to know what to make of the arrests in Buffalo of the young men of Yemeni background who are being held on seemingly flimsy charges of potential terrorism. I know that some will be glad that our intelligence community is hard at work, but the evidence of wrongdoing does not seem to be compelling. And various constitutional lawyers, as well as some judges, believe that this law, under which they are being held, is unconstitutional.

Economic warfare against the poor, war against the Constitution and civil liberties - the use of the war metaphor is admittedly a bit of hyperbole, exaggeration, but there are millions being hurt, and our society is not doing right by our ideals. One of the great new monuments in Washington, DC is the one to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Along one of the marble walls are inscribed these words: "I see one third of a nation ill housed, ill nourished… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

All of which brings me to the matter of actually going to war, a real, honest-to-goodness, bomb-dropping, soldier-killing, civilian-killing (accidental, collateral damage deaths) war…

President Bush has just released a new, congressionally mandated statement about the strategic goals of his foreign policy, and it is a radical departure from the past 50 years of our international policy.

It is in the vein of Plato's philosopher king; the wise, compassionate ruler can do whatever he wants and can be trusted.

• Unilateral military action by the United States is asserted as a right.
  
• Eliminating another nation's ability to attempt to match our military power is asserted as a right.
  
• The cooperative relationships and the rule of international law are subordinate to the United States' own decisions.

As I have read about it in the last couple of days, it seems as if it is arrogant without bounds. And it is foolish for any of our leaders not to realize that such arrogance by the United States has left our great, idealistic nation open to legitimate charges of violating our own principles and ideals.
It is a simple, grand vision of United States imperialism, presumably a benevolent emperor, but imperialism nonetheless. It is in keeping with Bush's repudiation of the Kyoto protocols on the environment and of the International Criminal Court. It strikes me as making the world less safe by alienating more of the world's citizens, who have seen the power and glory of our democratic ideals, our freedom and our prosperity, and have also seen us betray our best selves at times.

Equally scary to me is the present resolution before Congress authorizing President Bush to use any means he deems necessary to address the regime of Saddam Hussein, not only the resolution, but apparently the minimal opposition to it at this time among members of Congress, none of whom in an election year would want to be painted, albeit unfairly, as soft on terrorism by voting against this horrendous legislation.

Some of the questions on my mind and that others too may have raised include:

1. Is it morally acceptable to become an aggressor and no doubt inflict further suffering and death on the Iraqi people?

2. Morally, practically and diplomatically, is it wise to violate international law and the United Nations charter, to which we have subscribed? Bush's resolution before Congress provides for unilateral aggression on our part, over against the UN Charter that provides for self defense "against armed attack."

3. Shouldn't we as the world's leading nation-state use our power to nudge the globe toward international law, rather than away from it?

4. Is there sufficient justification to go to war against Iraq, in that President Bush has not provided any evidence of Iraq being an imminent threat to the United States or our allies in the region?

5. Wouldn't the UN inspection teams be able to ascertain if there were such an actual threat to us from biological, chemical or nuclear weapons? Many experts say that this can be done and was done with some success in the past.

6. What happens if Hussein is removed? Another dictatorship, one that we would prop up for how many years to come?

7. If attacked, would Hussein attack Israel as a last resort act of vengeance? As President Clinton observed last week on the David Letterman show of all places, how do you factor in the possibility/probability that Hussein would under threat of being conquered find ways to put any weapons of mass destruction that he has into the hands of terrorists?

8. Will President Bush's preparations for war lead Hussein himself to make a preemptive strike in some way?

9. Does it make sense to send 250,000 to 500,000 American troops to invade Iraq, and for how long? How many will die? Surely many more than the 400 who died in the Gulf War. Is all this worth it, when the present policy of containment is working and can be strengthened?

10. What about public opinion, 61% saying that we should act militarily only if the international community approves? (LA Times poll) (which to my mind still is not a sufficient cause for us to go to war.)

11. What about our moral standing in the world? Republican Majority Leader Richard Armey initially objected to President Bush's proposal saying, such an attack "would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation."

12. From an economic standpoint, wouldn't war against Iraq increase oil prices, increase the budget deficit, harm the airline industry, diminish consumer confidence and otherwise hurt our already fragile economy?

13. What has/will happen to the war against Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, who has directly attacked us and is a more direct threat to us than Saddam Hussein? Shouldn't our president focus on the immediate threats to our safety and security, even though it does not have the political juice of a new war?

14. As Eric Alterman puts it, "About this pre-emptive war stuff, who gets to go next? China against Taiwan? India against Pakistan? Or is it just a white guy thing?" (The Nation, 10/7/02, 10)

The list of questions, of course, can go on and on. The gain from war is that it will distract us from the economic problems we face, and it gives Bush's war on terrorism a manageable target, an enemy whom we can defeat.

But it comes at a great cost to our own moral standing in the world, reflecting a path of arrogance and imperialism. It reminds me of the prophetic poet Bob Dylan who wrote, "You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

In the face of this crisis, a new, destabilizing, arrogant strategy of pre-emptive war, what might be done?

One of the voices of wisdom that caught my ear was that of Maureen Dowd who writes a column for the New York Times:

The trap is sprung. The name of the game is containment.
Contain the wild man, the leader with the messianic and relentless glint who is scaring the world.
Surround him, throw Lilliputian nets on him, tie him up with a lot of UN inspection demands, humor him long enough to stop him from using his weapons and blowing up the Middle East.
But [she says] the object of the containment strategy is not Saddam Hussein, but George W. Bush, the president with real bombs, not the predator with plans to make them. (9/18/02)

In our democratic society, those who share these questions and come to the conclusion that we need to contain this leader will raise their voices, contact Congress and media, and take opportunities to protest, such as our Action for Justice Committee is doing with providing support for "Not in Our Name" organizing against Bush's militarism that includes a rally in Central Park on October 6th.

A key part of our spiritual work as individuals and as a community and a part of our religious mission is, if we choose, to develop critical consciousness of our life and times, to read the signs of the times.

The mission in part is to live as best we can on the margins of complicity to all that seduces us in larger culture.

That mission, as I see it, is to shape a community of resistance and courage, which is pervasively needed, and to create those coalitions of conscience that effect change.

To do these things: to develop critical consciousness, to live on the margins of complicity, to shape a community of resistance and courage, to create coalitions of conscience - then we keep faith with our moral ground, our better natures, the spark of the divine within each one of us.

The final word for this morning comes from Albert Camus who wrote:

We must mend
What has been torn apart,
Make justice imaginable again
In a world so obviously unjust,
Give happiness once more
To peoples poisoned
By the misery of the century.
Naturally,
It is a superhuman task.
But superhuman is the term
For tasks...(we) take a long time
To accomplish.
That's all.

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